So, back in February, I interviewed Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It was one of my favorite interviews ever, and we talked about his music, his book, and his conversion to Judaism.
There was a ton in there that didn’t make it into the final interview, largely having to do with Tweedy’s parts in movies and TV shows, so I thought I’d put that right here, with some clips embedded:
Wilco’s music, while not quite a pop radio mainstay, is often featured in movies and even
in TV commercials; an episode of the Showtime show Billions last year even had two
characters engage in a heart-to-heart over the band’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and what it meant for the doomed relationship between Tweedy and Jay Bennett:
There was even an acclaimed 2002 documentary about the band, I Am Trying To Break
Your Heart, and Tweedy had a guest-starring run on the sitcom Parks & Recreation,
which he said came about because lots of the show’s writers and performers were fans of him and the band.
Wilco – “Heavy Metal Drummer” (Jeff Tweedy’s son) from paranoidandroid on Vimeo.
“That’s where the flattering part ends because I think the character they were looking for was a washed-up Midwestern rock star, and they said I was the first person they thought of.”
One of the more memorable uses of Wilco in film was the scene in the 2014 film
Boyhood, in which the band’s song “Hate It Here” is playing in a car as Ethan Hawke’s character explains and praises the song to his teenaged son (Eller Cochrane.) While he likes the scene and the film, Tweedy says it’s not quite what it’s like when drives around his own sons.
“Ethan Hawke’s character in that scene was a lot more didactic towards his kid than I feel like I try to be with my kids, and it was very cool to be included in that movie… I think when Spencer and Sammy and I are in the car listening to music it’s much more as peers than me trying to interest them in what we’re listening to. I think what Ethan was doing in that scene was more teaching them how to listen deeply.”
Seeing his sons as peers goes beyond music singalongs, and Torah study. In the
documentary 17 years ago, Spencer is shown drumming to the rhythm of the Wilco song “Heavy Metal Drummer” and asking Tweedy to guess the song. The two released an album together in 2014, with Spencer playing drums.
Stephen Silver, Writer 